


where two stars meet

by Sapphic-Mia (JMoonrise)



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Former Friends, Idiots in Love, Kara the sleuth, Lost Journal, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, no powers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:39:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26260534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JMoonrise/pseuds/Sapphic-Mia
Summary: It’s a Friday when she findsitand by Sunday, she thinks she might be in love.
Relationships: Kara Danvers & Lena Luthor, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 14
Kudos: 133





	where two stars meet

She stares out of the window longingly, dreaming of days spent climbing trees and getting scraped knees, when her freedom wasn’t stripped from her, forcing her to stay indoors when she longed to be amongst the greenery. She’s spent much of her life surrounded by green. Though she knows there is no one else to blame for her predicament than herself, it still sucks that she is stuck in detention on such a beautiful spring day.   
  


The cold, claustrophobic atmosphere does little to ease her mind. The posters with math jokes and false platitudes offer hardly any comfort. The sterility surrounding her makes her think of hospitals, especially with the smell of antiseptic wafting in the air.

Groups of her peers flock out of the school, and she sighs, wishing she was one of them. Instead her history teacher gave her a detention— the first of her life— for daydreaming in class again. Her teacher called on her, purposely, and her lack of a coherent response gave her teacher all the justification she needed to send Kara straight to detention after school as she had been wanting to do all year. It is hardly her fault her teacher can make something as complex as WWII as dull as watching paint dry.   
  


She tries to stay focused in history but her mind is inevitably occupied with other thoughts that there is no room to think about wars and shifting politics. Instead she dreams of nights staring up at the stars, feeling incredibly small and insignificant when she considered the sheer vastness of space, a reassuring squeeze and bright eyes staring back at her.

Her lips pinch into a tight line. None of it is real and she should stop spending all of her time with her head in the clouds and focus on what is in front of her instead of behind her. Those days are gone and she needs to stop pretending they aren’t.

For a Friday afternoon, detention is dead. There are three other students sentenced to the same punishment, though none of them socialize in the same circles as her. On occasion, Kara has spoken to Siobhan through school assignments and when she briefly dated Winn when they were sophomores, other than that, using the word acquaintances would be too strong of a word. As for the other two, she thinks they are freshmen. She doesn’t interact much with the class two years below hers.   
  


None of them catch her interest, so she keeps her eyes peeled to the window. 

The teacher who has the unfortunate pleasure of watching over them sits at her desk, pen scratching across papers in a flurry, grading the latest batch of math tests, Mrs. Davidson-- a no nonsense teacher— and Kara spent an entire year together when she was a sophomore. She almost hated her entire experience in pre-calculus with the woman for how she picked on students and her poor understanding of the material. Fortunate for her at any rate, she has a different instructor for calculus. She grew to detest math, once finding comfort in numbers and then despising the symbols that brought her to Mrs. Davidson.

Her homework sits untouched on the desk, her pen tapping rhythmically on her thigh as she avoids completing the assignment. She glances down at her history homework, a frown marring her face as she looks over the worksheet handed out at the end of class. There are some short answer, fill in the blank, vocab, and multi-choice questions, but the thought of doing her homework when she could be enjoying the weather brings her mood down. Besides half the answers she doesn’t recall, most of them were discussed when her head was somewhere else, and she left her textbook in her locker.

She taps her pen harder, losing her grip on the utensil, wincing as it clatters to the floor. She peers at the others and no one has noticed her bout of clumsiness. She leans over to pick it up when she spots it.

 _It_ is a purple leather bound journal with an intricate design on the cover. She hesitates before snatching the worn journal off the ground. She tells herself it is so she can determine if there are any identifiable features like initials or a name embossed on the cover, so she can return it to its’ rightful owner. What kind of good samaritan would she be if she didn’t return someone’s lost property? If the janitorial staff had found it during their clean up, it might have gotten tossed or thrown into the lost and found. It is simply too pretty to leave in the hands of such careless staff.

Kara slips it into her backpack, deciding to think through her options regarding the lone journal later. She is positive the owner will discover it missing and she’ll be able to give it back to them with a pleased smile and the satisfaction of a job well done. 

Kara figures it is someone from one of the six sections of math Mrs. Davidson teaches, she almost gathers the courage to hand over the property to the woman before nixing it immediately. The woman would probably embarrass whoever the owner is by reading passages to her students. She won’t allow the woman to ridicule and torment some unsuspecting soul. 

With precious few options to occupy her time, she tucks the worksheet back into her homework folder and removes her calculus homework. The problems are fairly easy and she takes out her calculator to double check her work, losing herself in the equations and the math of it all. Unlike people, math is simple and there’s always a right answer. People are complicated, too complex for her to solve or approach how she solves a math problem. Every time she thinks she is helping, she ends up worsening the situation with her many blunders. Alex says she has good intentions, but her execution could use a lot of work.

Kara just wants to help. The desire to fix everything is ingrained in her and has been for the last five years when she learned that somethings are impossible to repair. 

She pumps her fist at the end when it is declared they are free to leave the premises. Kara speed walks right out of the classroom and away from her least favorite teacher. 

She heads to her locker, not having an opportunity to do it before detention. Her disposition brightens when she opens it to find pictures of her and her friends on the door. There’s even one from her first day of middle school, long before things changed and nothing was the same.

Her lips curl into a smile, thinking of a time when her life was less complicated and she had yet to experience true pain and heartache.

She grabs some books, a binder, and a few notebooks before closing it on her hand, too distracted by the sudden presence of the last person she expected.

“Ow,” she yelps, shaking out her smarting hand. “Damn.” Her bag falls to the ground, the contents spilling out in every direction. Pens roll across the floor and papers flutter everywhere. Irritation rolls through her body at the mess, though not enough to stop her from looking at her former best friend.

Kara ducks her head, peering through the thick of her lashes as _Lena Luthor_ walks passed her. Lena says nothing to her, nor does she look in her direction as she continues down the hall, which is a typical reaction. There is no form of acknowledgement from the other girl, and it’s difficult to pretend it doesn’t hurt to know how little she means to Lena. She supposed friends forever and always meant little to nothing to her in the end. 

Her shiny, dark hair is tucked into her dark purple coat as she struts away like she owns the place. Her stride is quick and determined as she turns to head down the math hallway without once turning in Kara’s direction.

Kara almost calls out a greeting before she disappears around the bend. She and Lena were friends for most of their lives until seventh grade when things shifted between them. 

Suddenly, Lena had no time for her and was hanging with an entirely different crowd, the type of kids who would never be caught dead with someone like Kara. There was no room for Kara in her life any longer, and she made it clear by her cruel dismissal in front of the whole seventh grade.

“Could’ve at least helped,” she mutters, kneeling to collect her belongings. She never quite accepted Lena’s change in behavior. She respected it and kept her distance, but she hated every minute of it. 

One day Lena was sleeping in her bed as they giggled and gossiped and the next she was telling Kara she had outgrown her, and it was time for them to go in their own directions. She didn’t need someone who still shopped in the kids’ department hanging around her.

Next thing Kara knew, Lena was hanging out with the so-called ‘cool’ kids and spending time with _actual_ high schoolers. That was years ago and Kara is mostly over it.

So she really never got over it, but she’s found her niche in the high school hierarchy. There are people she can count on to be there for her, and she no longer spends her days eating lunch alone. There’s not much more she can ask for then that. 

In the end, she had to let Lena go and never stopped believing the tides would turn in her favor in the future. 

Kara slides her backpack on and heads towards the parking lot. The lot is mostly empty, with most teachers and students having fled school grounds after the final bell rang. No one hung around school on Friday unless they had to. She tosses her bag into her backseat, taking a moment to lean against the car door. 

Seeing Lena after school hours caught her off guard, especially after years of only catching glimpses of the brunette in the halls. Normally she has time to prepare her reactions before laying s upon her. They’ve only had a few classes together in the last five years, and Lena and her are always seated at opposite ends of the classroom. She thinks that might be intentional.

Every time she’s in close proximity, it leaves her feeling unsettled and off kilter. She wants to talk to her, ask what she did to cause Lena to hate her and end their friendship, to apologise for her transgressions whatever they may be. Really, she just misses Lena.

Her sister, Alex, claims it is the lack of closure after eight years of friendship and nothing but tears and a cracked heart to show for it. She _only_ cried for a month, or six. It is hardly as big of a deal as her sister made it out to be. 

She pushes the unpleasant thought away, unwilling to investigate the matter further after the latest Lena snub. If this is how Lena wants things to be, then that’s how they will stay. Kara has no time for people who want nothing to do with her. Another lie she wills herself to believe in the hopes that it might be true one day.

* * *

If there is one thing Kara is known for aside from her positivity and helpfulness, it’s her forgetful nature. At times, she can be classified as absentminded, often forgetting tasks given to her or due dates for school assignments, so it is no surprise it takes her until Sunday night to remember the journal she discovered.

The moment she arrived home Friday, her mom sent her out to the grocery store to pick up a few last minute items for dinner. Then sent her off to complete her homework while she made dinner. Saturday mornings she helped coach softball and that afternoon, she helped paint sets for the spring musical. Sundays were the only days where no one expected anything of her and she was allowed to lay around the house without her mom giving her the stink eye.

So no one could blame her for not remembering sooner she had brought home a journal—that didn’t belong to her.

Alex would lecture her if she knew what she was contemplating. She was constantly on her case about minding people’s boundaries, an area of her life she was working on improving. At least, she had successfully done it with the person she was most attached to aside from her sister. She deserved credit for that.   


Then again, Lena did most of the distancing for her. It still counted though. It was the thought. 

Still, most of the time Kara likes to think she is respectful of people’s privacies. She would never force anyone to reveal something personal about themselves or dare to share their secrets with the entire school. It is not the type of person she is. 

Except for this journal. 

She sets the journal on her bed and stares at it, as if begging it to reveal all of its’ secrets without her opening it. Though it would be totally awesome if she had a _Chamber of Secrets_ moment where she gets sucked into the book. Then again trusting a journal hadn’t done Harry a lot of favors and made him distrust someone he cared about. What if this journal was filled with crude drawings or the latest gossip like some burn book? What do most high schoolers write about in a journal? 

She shoves it away in favor of spending time on Netflix. All she needs is a distraction to keep her from opening it, that’s it. She’ll come up with a plan and give it back to the owner before they have time to miss it. She can figure it out without reading it. She is sure of it. 

Oh who the hell is she kidding, no she can't. She has to know what's inside. It is eating her up inside. The curiosity burns through her bloodstream.

Her eyes crawl back to where it lays innocuously on the edge of her bed. She bites her lip as it taunts her. Her curiosity is getting the best of her and she remembers Lena scolding her often for allowing it to get her into trouble. She fists her duvet to resist grabbing it. She knows if she reads the journal, she’ll be violating all sorts of ethics and crossing a line she can’t take back. She remembers how angry she was at Alex when she read her diary in the fifth grade and the most damning thing in it was that she wanted to marry Lena, which she wrote when she was eight.

Kara slams her computer shut and tosses it to the side as she scoots across the bed. To hell with ethics.

She fingers the string tied in a loose bow that is the only barrier between her and the contents of the journal. “To hell with it,” she says, unwrapping it and opening it to reveal the first page.

There is nothing to denote who the author is. The tidy handwriting is lovely with beautiful loops and careful spacing scrawled across each page. Her own cursive is nowhere near as neat, something Lena used to tease her for when they were younger. Lena had the prettier handwriting of the two of them and was often the one who did all the writing between them. Kara was the artist. 

The first page is a dedication.

_For my pretty, little space cadet_

_With your head in the clouds_

_Here's something to bring you down_

_To the ground with me_

_When space no longer calls_

She knows after reading the dedication, she should stop and close it. Whatever is inside is highly personal and it wouldn’t be right for her to read it, especially as the owner could be anyone. It hadn’t seemed real to her until she opened it and saw the words on the page. Someone had poured their thoughts and feelings into this.

The words are meant for someone who is obviously not her, but if she keeps reading, it might help reveal the owner and she does want to find them. She wishes there was someone who loved her enough to dedicate an entire journal to her. So she continues.

Kara flips through to get a sense of the contents, finding it a mix of comics, doodles, song lyrics, musings, and poetry. The subject of each of them is centered on love for a girl. It narrows down her pool of suspects to a degree. She imagines it is either a boy or a girl who likes girls. Though given her sister didn’t come out until she was in college, she worries it might not be as simple as she is imagining. What if it is a girl who is not ready to come out? Kara would know when she returns it.

Something compels her to start at the beginning, to read words written for another that are deeper and more meaningful than anything she has produced. With each turn of the page, her heart aches more for the author—who is in love and grows more emotional with each entry. This person has bared their soul for whoever has caught their affections and Kara fervently wishes it was her someone spent hours upon hours writing about. She longs to discover the identity, to assist this person in whatever way she can. Someone who can write like this deserves all of the love in the world.

_You left an indelible mark on my soul. Our eyes met that first day and it was as if my soul recognized yours and I knew._

She brushes a tear from her cheek. She feels an undeniable pull to this person and their pain as they agonize over a girl who has failed to see how much they mean to the writer. There are erasure marks and words crossed out in pen as they struggled to find the words to convey their feelings. Kara has never _felt_ like this in her life. This person has touched her heart and soul with their words.

_Giving it away was easy,_

_Asking for it back,_

_Proved impossible_

Kara wants to wrap them in her arms and never let go. They deserve all of the hugs in the world. It does make her wonder who could pen such heartfelt words at school and have them go unreturned like this.

She grabs one of her notepads from her night stand to devise a plan to find the person who wrote this. Obviously the person is in one of Mrs. Davidson’s class as the journal was found under her desk. She taps her pen to her chin. She has to figure out who sits there. Mrs. Davidson taught six math classes, so there are six people out there who could have possibly written such bewitching words to describe the object of their affection and what she meant to them.

The class was clearing out when she entered the room and she thinks Mike Elliot sat in the seat during the last period. She makes a face as she scribbles his name on the paper. Though she doubts he is capable of such depth or any depth at all, she has to be thorough in her search.

To figure out who else shares the seat, she’ll have to make a detour during every period on the way to the bathroom. Then from there, she can start talking to them and form a profile that she can use to eliminate suspects.

_When I was twelve, I discovered heartbreak was the color of your eyes._

Something about that makes her feel incredibly lonely and as if this person would understand her. She would help them confront their crush, or hope she didn’t fall in love with them. She was already in love with their words and the world they painted with them.

She wants to be the pretty little space cadet. She is blonde and blue eyed like the cadet in the comics. The blonde tells her friend she wants to travel the stars when she grows up and discover all the worlds. Then one day, she is chosen to do just that. She gets in a rocket ship and flies away to explore the cosmos. Though she had daydreamed about space her whole life, once she is in space, all she can dream about is the one she left behind.

The space cadet visits all of these planets and sees the stars she only saw in the night sky, but she feels there is something wrong with her. She thought she would be happy. This was her idea of a perfect life. The longer she is gone, the more she realizes the real star is the person who held her hand in the dark, who brightened her day by encouraging her dreams and loving her.

The pretty, little space cadet wants to go home to her favorite star, the one that makes everything shine brighter. Her plans go awry immediately and she is waylaid by disaster after disaster. At one point, she almost gives up and falls for another, D’rea. She is happy for a while until the sadness comes crashing back into her life. She finds the charm given to her by her personal star and remembers how much she wants to go home. The new planet is amazing— as is D’rea— yet there is something missing. The space cadet grows unhappy and eventually confesses to D’rea she can no longer stay. She has light years more to travel, and if it takes her the rest of her life, she will make it back to her love, her shining star.

The comic remains unfinished much to Kara’s frustration. There are a lot of eraser marks from where they tried to start the next part, then going back and starting over. She wants to know how it ends, if the star and the space cadet are reunited and live happily ever after. Other people view her as naive and innocent, likening her disposition to that of a Disney princess after she declared her love of happy endings. In her experience real life doesn’t always give people the endings they want, so it is a natural response to seek it through other mediums, particularly storytelling.

She will have to ask what the intended ending is, or if there is one at all. She has to believe there is a happy ending in store for the two star-crossed lovers.

* * *

Lena growls as she tears apart her bedroom in search of her missing journal. She arrived home five minutes ago and pilfered through her school bag to grab her journal. She has an idea for the next segment of her comic. The problem is that the infernal thing isn’t where she last saw it. It was in her book bag, at least it was there when she had taken out her calculus notebook.

She freezes with the realization that it might be at school. She drops her bag and instead snatches her keys off her desk, running down the stairs and to her car without a thought. She barely abides by the speed limit in her rush to get back to the school. She parks close to the side doors and is out of her car instantly, rushing to the gym door. The gym is empty as is the rest of the school as she prowls the halls.

She starts with her last two classes as the math hall is the farthest from her current location. Lena pokes her head into her history classroom, eyes sweeping under the desks to no avail. The journal is nowhere in sight. She refuses to let it deter her as she head over to her English class, where there is also no journal. She does know for a fact that she saw it in calculus and deduces that it must be there.

Lena quickens her pace when she spots someone at their locker and keeps her eyes forward when it hits her that it is Kara— as in Kara Danvers, her childhood best friend and the girl she loves. Barely ten words have been exchanged between them since the seventh grade and Lena intends to keep it that way.

She ignores how her heart speeds up and her clammy palms as she passes the other girl. She almost stops to help when her stuff spills out of her bag, but keeps moving along, lest she says anything damning. She holds back a chuckle when she hears Kara grumble about her not helping.

The room is empty, which means detention has cleared out and her evil teacher has left the building. She seriously despises the woman and holds her tongue when the woman has done the calculations wrong. If the woman wants to make a fool out of herself, who is Lena to stop her? She drops to her knees at her desk and her shoulders droop when there is no hint of purple leather. If someone found it, there is no chance of her knowing who it was. There are two other classes after hers and there was an afternoon detention, anyone could have found it and absconded with her journal.

What if they read it? Would they know who it is about? She tried to be discreet. She didn’t mention any names and her name is nowhere to be found.

Lena bites her lip as she pushes up from the floor. She has no chance of finding out who picked it up. For the first time in her life, Lena is wholly unprepared. It is not something she enjoys feeling and this unexpectedness of what comes next leaves her slightly unhinged, so much so her mother takes notice at dinner.

“Lena, honey,” she barely glances up from her dinner. Her brows are tightly knit together as she works over a mental list of suspects. Surely, there aren’t that many people who would take someone else’s property. Maybe they turned it into the lost and found. “Lena?” Her mother waves a hand in front of her face.

She blinks. “Oh… yes?”

“Are you alright?” The concern in her mother’s voice makes the guilt churn. “You’ve been staring at your dinner like it’s a science experiment.”

“No,” she shakes her head. “I mean yes, I am fine mom. I’m just working through something is all.”

Her mother looks less than satisfied by her response. She contemplates fessing to the truth and seeking advice about her next moves, but her mother looks tired. She doesn’t want to add to her stress. It is just the two of them after her dad left and then died of cancer. Her brother is awol, doing whatever it is he does without caring to check in with his family. She hasn’t seen him since the funeral and she swears if he ever gets the nerve to show his smarmy face again, she will deck him.

“If you’re sure…” she is hesitant to drop the topic. Her mom has worried about her since the day she dropped Kara as a friend and adopted a whole new group of friends.

“I am,” Lena shoots her mom a reassuring smile. “It’s just been a long week is all. How was the hospital?”

“It was good. The ER was busy after an accident on Pine. Eliza says hi by the way.” Her mom doesn’t understand her reticence to speak of anything relating to her former best friend.

She shoves down the familiar trickling of guilt. When she cut Kara out of her life, she cut the Danvers out by default. It helped that she and her mom moved across town. She didn’t have to look out her bedroom into Kara’s bedroom. There was no chance of running into her when they left their houses for school, nor was there any chance of Kara coming over to hang out.

Lena spends her weekend holed up in her room, dreading Monday and what it could potentially mean for her. The odds are not in her favor and it is unlikely someone will fess up to finding a missing journal. What is probable is someone figuring out she wrote it and the person she dedicated to is Kara. They could use it to torture her or blackmail her until she cracked. It would destroy her reputation if someone leaked the pages, attaching them to her. She refuses to imagine that scenario or the look on Kara’s face when it was inevitably revealed. She couldn’t stomach the idea of the blonde hating her for pushing her away.

Sunday night she pulls out a new journal. Her mother gifted it to her on her sixteenth birthday. She was waiting until she filled all of the pages in the old one before starting in a new one. However, the desire to write bubbled up in her and she was grabbing her favorite green pen, hand poised at the ready. Her mind drifts and the words come to her like magic. All she has to do is picture hair bright like the sun, eyes as reflective as the sea, the prettiest smile, and her hand did the rest.

She thinks of the pretty, little space cadet, remembering nights under the stars, or the far off look she got when she talked about exploring the expanse and discovering worlds previously unknown.

_You have the most extraordinary range of emotions. Seeing life through many different colors and lenses. Approaching everything as if it just another adventure waiting to happen. How I marveled at your remarkable ability to see light where only there is darkness. The fact that you exist is a miracle. These years without you has leached the color from my life. The flowers no longer sing, the wind does not dance, and the world is still in your absence. I ache for the scent of a warm summer breeze when you walked beside me._

The ideas freely flow and she starts the next bit of her comic. Maybe it is time for the space cadet to begin the real journey home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you thought. 
> 
> You can follow me on [ _tumblr_.](https://jmoonrise.tumblr.com)


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